Computing Facility

The MRL as part of the UCSB Center for Scientific Computing (CSC) offers an array of specialized High Performance Computing (HPC) environments to support research. The CSC provides both the hardware to run calculations as well as consulting and training services to assist in the optimal use of HPC facilities.

High Performance Computing Environments:

The typical CSC computational resource is a linux Beowulf cluster. The CSC currently has 5 clusters of v arying sizes and most with optimized high-speed interconnect. Our standard hardware configurations cover the following environments.

Standard Beowulf Clusters 2000+ cores (and growing!)

Large Memory compute nodes (RAM = 512GB)

Extra Large Memory computer nodes (RAM = 1000GB)

Dedicated Graphical Processing Units nodes (GPU nodes)

We also host three 'condo clusters' where researchers buy nodes in a cluster used only by participating groups. The CSC pays for cluster infrastructure and administers the system, allowing all of the financial resources of the researchers to go to increased computational throughput.

High Performance Computing Software

Software can provide an important and critical step in obtaining research results in a timely manner. The CSC strives to meet the needs of its users and has licensed and installed the following software (some are licensed only to particular groups, indicated with *).